Matthew D'Ancona's Evening Standard article is worth a read and answers David Ainsworth's comments on this thread and others far better than I can.Entitlement comes in many forms, but it has a uniform core of symptoms. As one watched Emily Maitlis’s fateful interview with Prince Andrew , his bafflement that he should have to be answering these questions at all was scarcely concealed. Why the fuss? Jeremy Corbyn’s sense of impunity is ideological rather than royal in origin. Yet, as Andrew Neil took him to pieces last night, the Labour leader’s irritation at the BBC presenter’s cross-examination was quite evident. It was as though Neil’s wholly legitimate and characteristically forensic questions were somehow an impertinence.At heart, Corbyn still does not really grasp why anti-Semitism has become such a stain on his leadership, and such an obstacle to his political ambitions. Yesterday’s highly unusual intervention in The Times by Ephraim Mirvis, the Chief Rabbi — declaring him “unfit for office” and warning that “the very soul of our nation is at stake” — ought to have prompted, at the very least, a conspicuous display of empathy and sadness that it should have come to this. Yet Corbyn was as undemonstrative as he could have been. Invited four times by Neil to apologise for the anxiety felt by British Jews, he declined point-blank to do so . The problem of racism against Jews in the Labour Party is bad enough — a moral and structural deficiency that raises serious questions about the world view of a significant part of the movement. Meanwhile, Corbyn’s dismal response to the problem — since Luciana Berger, the MP for Liverpool Wavertree, first asked in March 2018 why he had queried the local authority’s removal of a self-evidently anti-Semitic mural in east London — has been profoundly revealing. It has opened a window into his political soul: his ideological fixity, his cussedness, and his consequent inability to manage what ought to have been a straightforward internal party matter. Just to anticipate the inevitable “what-aboutery”: I have written often, and with unambiguous condemnation, about Boris Johnson’s appalling description of Muslim women in religious clothing as “letterboxes”, and about the Conservative Party’s deplorable embrace of populist nativism. The Prime Minister’s dilution of his pledge to hold an inquiry into Islamophobia is pathetic. But this column is about the Chief Rabbi’s Times article and Corbyn’s response. Okay? Okay.The inventory of revelations and allegations is now bleakly familiar: the mural; Hamas and Hezbollah as “friends”; Corbyn declaring that certain Jews lacked “English irony”; his claim to have been “present but not involved” at a wreath-laying ceremony in a cemetery near the graves of terrorists responsible for the 1972 Munich atrocities; his initial rejection of the standard International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition of anti-Semitism; claims that Corbyn’s office interfered in investigations of anti-Jewish racism; the departure of Berger and other Labour MPs from the party over his handling of the crisis; and so on.You might think that, only a fortnight away from polling day, the time had come for a heartfelt moment of atonement, clarity and public determination to make right what is so clearly wrong. Instead, a Labour spokeswoman issued the usual boilerplate response: namely that “Jeremy Corbyn is a lifelong campaigner against anti-Semitism and has made absolutely clear it has no place in our party and society and that no one who engages in it does so in his name.”But if that is so, why, then, was he joined at the launch of Labour’s race and faith manifesto yesterday by three candidates embroiled in the anti-Semitism scandal? If racism against Jews really “has no place in our party” then how to explain — for instance — the presence of Afzal Khan, Labour’s candidate for Manchester Gorton, who shared a Facebook post in 2015 that referred to an “Israel-British- Swiss-Rothschilds crime syndicate”?What are British Jews to make of this? Time and again, they have expressed their anxiety and anger about this pattern of behaviour. Time and again, they have been palmed off with promises of action — only to witness egregious backsliding.Can you imagine any other ethnic or religious minority being treated in this way by Labour? Being told, in effect, that its fearfulness was empty of meaning, on the axiomatic basis that Corbyn, as the great scourge of racism, could not possibly be guilty of or complicit in bigotry of any kind?Underpinning this is an ugly truth: that Corbyn and the hard Left do not, in fact, regard anti-Semitism as equivalent to other forms of racism; that they analyse the world, first and foremost, in terms of power relations, and regard Jews, generally speaking, as powerful rather than vulnerable; that their antipathy to what they call “Zionism” infects their entire approach to both geo-politics and “imperialism” generally, and their particular fixation with the allegiance of British Jews to Israel. Labour’s problem with anti-Semitism, in other words, is not an ugly distraction but the heart of the matter. It reflects the stubbornness and introspection of the party under Corbyn. It is of a piece with his profoundly divisive approach to politics. It is eccentric and sinister.Corbyn did not apologise last night because he does not think he has anything to apologise for. It is no accident that he allowed this issue to fester for so long — and that is because he simply does not accept that it is an issue. All of which tells us a great deal about his character and politics — not least that he is quite unfit to be prime minister.
Lucille Grant ● 2539d